Plot
Stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, U.S. Navy sailors, Billy "Badass" Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young) are assigned shore patrol detail to escort young sailor Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to Portsmouth Naval Prison near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Meadows has drawn a stiff eight-year sentence for a petty crime: trying to steal $40 from a mite box of the C.O.'s wife's favorite charity. During their train trip up the northeast corridor, the oddly likeable Meadows begins to grow on the two Navy "lifers"; they know the grim reality of the Marine guards at Portsmouth, and feel sorry he'll miss his youth serving his sentence. They decide to show him a good time before delivering him to the brig.
With several days to spare before they are due in Portsmouth, the trio detrains at the major cities along the route to provide bon-voyage adventures for Meadows. In Washington, they take him to a bar to have a beer, but are denied because Meadows is too young. Buddusky gets a few six packs and a hotel room, and the three get drunk. In Philadelphia, they seek out Meadows's mother, only to find her away for the day and the house cluttered with empty whiskey bottles. In New York, they take him ice skating at Rockefeller Center and then in Boston, to a brothel to lose his virginity. In between, they brawl with Marines in a public restroom, dine on "the world's finest" Italian sausage sandwich, chant with Nichiren Shōshū Buddhists and open intimate windows for each other in swaying train coaches. Meadows pronounces his several days with Badass and Mule to be the best of his whole life.
When they finally arrive in frozen Portsmouth, Meadows has a final request – a picnic – so they buy some hot dogs and attempt a frigid picnic in the crunching snow. Docile Meadows walks along the park, seemingly ready to head to prison. He suddenly bolts, though, in a last-ditch effort to run away. Buddusky runs after him, catches him, and pistol-whips him fiercely. Mulhall and Buddusky then brusquely take Meadows to the prison, execute the Navy paperwork, and after being released from their detail, they stride away angrily, berating the marines they have encountered at the prison – and about how hopefully their orders will come through when they get back to Norfolk.
Read more about this topic: The Last Detail
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)